Evangelical Elites and Ideology

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and I have the privilege today of actually sitting down with my very own thesis director, Dr. Kerry Roberts. Thank you for being willing to...

I'm happy to do it.

Yeah. Well, we've met many times in your office talking about the first book that I published, Social Justice Goes to Church, and there was a lot of things that you taught me or showed me or questions you asked that made me, prompted me to explore further and come to some of the conclusions that many have found helpful.

Evangelical Elites, Woke Incursion, and the Detachment of Rank-and-File Believers

I want to talk to you a little bit about elites, evangelical elites in particular, and the solution to the woke incursion that's happening right now. Because I think a lot of people on the local level in their churches, laymen who, you know, they give, they just want to see their family prosper.

They're very confused. They don't understand exactly what's going on around them, and they can't conceive of why people like Russell Moore or David French or Tim Keller keep selling them out to outlets like the New York Times.

And I know you have worked in Christian, a Christian institution, obviously, which I'm very grateful for. You've been around Christians, I'm assuming, your whole life, just like I have. What explains this among people who say they believe the Bible and yet they'll go to an outlet like the New York Times?

I think that it's important to understand the evangelical intelligentsia that really dominates a lot of channels of Christian belief systems. A lot of channels through social media, through journals, through magazines.

This elite that kind of came into their own in the early 21st century is very different from previous evangelical elites. They come from a different kind of class. They may come from different regions of the country.

They look a lot more like the dominant elites elsewhere in America than they do their own congregations. There are exceptions to that. Russell Moore is from South Mississippi, for example. He's not from Chicago.

He's not from New York City. But I think for a lot of them, they really do betray a kind of regional and urban bias. And it's not just even an urban bias. It's that they're portraying specific urban biases.

And so they want to present their arguments for a national audience, but they're really not talking to a national audience. They're talking to those they know. They're talking to their own circle. They're talking to people like them.

And this, I believe, explains part of the detachment that many rank-and-file believers feel. They don't understand the words. They don't understand the sentiments. They don't understand the examples.

Because they don't even share the same neighborhoods and interests and community infrastructure that many of these evangelical elites have.

It's so funny that you mention that, because one of the attendees at the conference we're at right now told me he's in Nashville. And I won't say the church he goes to, but he goes to a large church there.

And he said that it has this problem of trying to guilt white people constantly. Every time there's a shooting, the pastor will get up there and guilt white people. And it's got the woke virus. And he said, though, they always say they're about Nashville.

They're about the city. They're about minorities in particular. And yet they live in the richest white neighborhoods that you can possibly buy outside the city. And I've noticed that same pattern in places I've been, among people who are woke and so forth.

They're not living that, though. They're not going to the inner cities and living there and helping the people they claim to care about. I guess what I'm saying is there's a hypocrisy, it seems. And some of the laymen are detecting this, just like that individual I referenced.

He's noticing there's a discrepancy there. What you're saying is that the reason for it is they're not saying they're for minorities or any group they claim to represent because they actually care about them as much as it is they're signaling to their peers.

That's, I guess, a virtue signal or a class demarker. Is there any way to unwrap that a little more for people who don't understand how that works?

Ideology as a Closed Rationalistic System

Well, I think that the answer to this, or the presumptions... I mean, you've made a lot of presumptions there. You've outlined a series of different categories of different things that deserve to be unpacked.

You've used words like guilt, white guilt, social justice, woke, virtue signaling.

I did.

All of those kinds of things, and they all carry certain meanings. I think it's important for American Christians to understand where does all this stuff come from? And it comes from a certain way of thinking.

It's not that they're rooted in very specific ideas, or that these terms are symbols, sort of reflective of greater packages. Abortion is a good example of this. Abortion is a package that carries lots of different meanings.

So what a person says about abortion, if they're pro-life or pro-choice, is taken to reflect what they think about a whole series of other things.

Right.

So if I'm pro-choice, it must mean I favor sexual liberation. It means that I want to approach urban problems from a standpoint of certain kinds of social justice. It means I may favor certain political candidates.

It means that I might favor a certain kind of tax code. I mean, it's this great tool that can explain so many different things. And we're apt to buy into that and endorse that way of thinking. I would say this reflects ideological thinking.

And that's tough for folks to understand because we think ideology, in common parlance, is just a synonym for ideas. Well, this person has an ideology. Or this person's ideology is based on A, B, and C.

So we use that synonymously with ideas, right?

Right.

But that's not what ideology really means. That's not where the term originates. That's not what 18th century French observers and Scottish observers meant when they coined the term ideology and ideologues.

What they had in mind, which we need to recapture, is a very closed, rationalistic system of belief that explains everything else. And it's different from religion. It's different from Christianity. It's different from being biblical.

Instead, if you adopt an ideological perspective, everything around you is interpreted exclusively through that set of ideas.

Including the Bible.

Including Scripture. Including social problems. Including your family. Including what films you watch, what food you consume. It affects what you wear. It affects how you part your hair. If I had any.

So all of that is a product of ideological thinking. And it's something that's very specific. And it is a problem across the American church and really all aspects of American society.

So for people who are new to this, that they might be driving in their car, whatever they're doing as they listen to this podcast, they're probably thinking, I've never heard this before. And there's all kinds of questions coming to their mind about it.

Is ideology, you said it's not a religion, but is it an extra layer? I don't even know if that's the way to put it. Is it something that must be adopted in order to be in these upper echelon elite circles?

You must have a matching ideology. And so then signaling these virtue signal things are a way to signal I match your ideology. We're on the same team.

Ideology as Fanaticism and the Opposite of Scripture-Shaped Vision

Yeah. Yeah.

One way of thinking of this is that ideology is to philosophy, to good thinking. What fanaticism is to religion.

Okay.

That's a good way.

It's an extreme form of something that we might consider to be very good. But it takes things to such an extreme because it's rationalistic. It rationalizes everything according to that specific belief structure.

So what I used to tell my kids growing up is you want to take, you want to take scripture and you want to use scripture to help you understand the world around you. You want, you want scripture to open your eyes.

You want scripture to help you see things you might otherwise not normally see. Ideology is the opposite of this. Ideology is blinders. It prevents you from seeing other things because you can only see things through that particular kind of filter.

Some people might call this a worldview, but that's such a nebulous term. I would stay away from worldview.

Which is one of the words that early on when I was starting this, I even made my website worldview conversations. But there's almost an ideological component to that because if you have this worldview that explains everything, then you can easily, if it doesn't match the grid that you've been given, you can easily dismiss it or not see it.

So what's an example, concretely speaking, of ideology?

Feminism, Social Justice, and Other Ideological Systems

Well, almost anything that ends with ISM is an ideology. So the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott talked about this as being rationalism. You take one way of looking at the world and then you rationalize everything else according to that.

Feminism would be a good example of this. So feminism has an understanding of history. Feminism has an understanding of human nature. Feminism has understandings of how human relationships must exist and how human relationships ought to exist.

All human relationships must rest on some kind of patriarchy, some sort of unequal disposition between males and females. But it ought to be different. And so feminism as an ideology seeks to kind of rewire human beings.

And I think this is one of the telltale signs of any ideological thinking. It moves people to be rewired according to the tenets of that ideological future.

So if feminism, this is the one you just picked, there's a big me too moment, I suppose you could say, in many evangelical denominations where they're trying to deal with abuse situations. And it seems to me what's happened is they're looking, I mean the Bible gives us instructions on these matters, but now they're bringing in analyses like we should use the standard of the preponderance of evidence instead of beyond a reasonable doubt.

Or we should automatically assume if it's a male and a female the male must be the abuser because that's what the ideology says. And this is getting into scripture where we're interpreting stories like David and Bathsheba as a rape assault of some kind when it's always been traditionally understood, at least mostly, as an adulterous affair of some kind.

So is that what you're talking about? Is that a good example?

Yeah, I think so. Because they're interpreting everything according to that understanding of how human existence must unfold. And I mean there are right-wing versions of ideologies, right? There are forms of ideology that even work to take humanity out of the equations.

Various types of environmental ideologies would be an example of this. But ideological thinking, the way we have described it here, it's relatively new. It's not something that existed 2 ,000 years ago.

It's not something that just pops up all of a sudden in the 1960s. Ideological thinking originates in the late Renaissance. It is largely English at first. It's in the English-speaking world. David Hume, the British philosopher and historian, said the Puritans were among the very first to come up with this.

Their kind of radicalism, their sort of religious fanaticism, he said this really isn't religion. It's not so much Christianity as it is a set of political beliefs that they have taken to an extreme. Now Hume said, look, we've got a lot to be thankful for for the Puritans.

Their understanding of liberty benefited a lot of people. But these people were also quite fanatical in those political dispositions. Yeah, this was new. So this just appeared. This was unseen in early modern Britain.

But it appears on the scene right as we move into the Enlightenment.

How Elite Institutions Manufacture Ideology

So how do you avoid this then, since everything is ideological? The analogy, and this might be imperfect, I'm thinking of, I don't know if you've seen on campus, there used to be a group at Liberty. You'd look outside and they were all playing.

They were dressed up in medieval garb. Do you remember this? They'd be whacking each other. In order to be part of that club, you had to be fanatical. You had to be obsessed with the rules of that game.

I don't even know what they called it. So there was a certain prerequisite to being accepted into that community and participating in their activity. And it seems to me that's kind of what's happened now.

Academia is like that, where if you start your college career, by the time you get to grad school, in most places, there's an expectation that you understand the rules, that you're going to be fanatical.

So how do you avoid that? Because we need to have higher education, right? We need educated leaders.

So there are waves of ideological thinking. The current wave, beginning in the 1990s, was largely a function of elite families who assumed that their children were going to enter places of management in a global capitalist world.

This is the late 80s. This is the early 90s. This is the era of NAFTA. This is the era of really finalizing the kind of global economic order we have right now. These parents themselves were in places of management and other kinds of leadership in American corporations.

They saw offshoring. They saw the direction the economy was headed. And they wanted to make sure that their children, who they were sending to elite preparatory schools, were as exposed to other cultures as they could possibly be.

That's where multiculturalism really came from. It was a curriculum initiative for American high schools. And then, very quickly, elite prep schools and colleges and private universities and colleges, and Ivy League schools adopted this.

They really reacted to what their parents were demanding for their own children, and they pushed this. And they empowered academics who also wanted to push this and saw an opportunity to really position themselves in influential jobs and other kinds of things.

But they took it several more steps further. It very quickly ceased to be just familiarizing your kids with the rest of the world and became, the rest of the world is a lot better than where you are now.

The rest of the world is a lot better than your elite preparatory academy and your peer group. And it was very easy for folks to push that because those elite peer groups were filled with identical people.

They were not the kind of high school you and I went to. They were not racially diverse. They were not economically diverse. They weren't even culturally diverse. They all looked and acted exactly the same.

And so those teachers looked at this as an opportunity to really break that solidarity and introduce a kind of intellectual diversity. Well, what they were doing was building an ideology.

Leadership Models in Campus Ministry and the Making of Evangelical Elites

Okay.

You pointed something out when I was doing graduate research that I've used as a critique before. Many people found it helpful. You pointed out in youth groups in the 1980s and 90s, I think you might have said 70s, there was this neo-evangelical impulse to identify at an early stage who might be a leader later on and become a global leader for the church.

So you're no longer looking for a biblical pastor but a global leader. And so they would approach the young man at 15 and say, have you considered seminary? Have you considered going into a field where you can benefit the church?

We see potential in you. They never channeled them towards other, why don't you be a lawyer? You're really smart. Or why don't you be a doctor? Why don't you serve the church? And I know this because I live part of this and I saw part of this.

The church I attended, not quite as bad, but I was familiar enough to know that that kind of thing was happening. And it does seem to me that we were selecting for a certain kind of person that was very similar to all the other artificial creations we were making.

And we put them in a seminary and said, now you all go be the leaders.

Yeah, and it's interesting because they were largely chosen. And this was not intentional, I don't think. I think it just sort of, again, followed along this kind of ideological thinking. People were chosen not because they reflected something genuine or diverse about the population they may serve.

They were being chosen because they really conformed to what those in positions of influence thought should be reinforced.

Right.

And so when we think about Campus Crusade or InterVar City Fellowship or other major campus ministries that took hold after World War II, their kind of leadership model actually impacted, if not created, the very evangelical intelligentsia we have today.

It's a leadership model. It's not really a servant model, nor is it a community model. It was, let's get people in, find those who are willing to lead a Bible study, who are willing to be a group leader, and then we will coach them into higher and higher places of influence and authority.

It's really an influencer model, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

Oakeshott, Scruton, and Reading for a Better Understanding of Ideology

Well, it's not the biblical model we're given. So, alright, final question here. What resources can you recommend to people, books perhaps, that they could read to understand this better? Because it took me a while to understand ideology.

Well, I mean, personally, my own intellectual influence depended heavily on Michael Oakeshott. I was actually going to college in Great Britain when he died. I remember the day I got my edition of the newspaper and there was Oakeshott's obituary.

I still have that obituary. So Oakeshott's rationalism in politics would be a good starting point. And there are briefer essays within that that can help folks understand this at a deeper level. I'm going to actually give a really weird additional thing for folks to use.

The British conservative Roger Scruton, S-C-R-U-T-O-N, he wrote this wonderful dictionary. Roger Scruton's Dictionary of Political Thought, I believe, was the original title. It has excellent entries on ideologies.

Really?

Not only does it have a great entry on ideology itself, it has very good entries on all of these other isms and explains them from this kind of rationalism definition that I've provided in this conversation.

Who would ever imagine reading a dictionary? But I strongly recommend that.

And I love Roger Scruton, so I wasn't aware of that particular book, but now I'm going to have to get it. Well, Dr. Roberts, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.